The desire to blow the house down and move on has always been the mainspring of Hanif Kureishi's fiction. From the exhilarating youngsters of My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia to the lachrymose adulterers who walk out of the door in chilly recent stories and novels, his protagonists will themselves to move on towards the lives they believe they deserve.

This new novel begins in an abruptly broken home. Gabriel's mother has slung Rex, his father, out - too little work, too much time hanging out with wastrels who 'only left the pub to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings'. Rex (a king rudely toppled from the domestic throne) played guitar in the Seventies with rock idol, Lester Jones, until he fell from his vertiginous platform heels and broke his ankle. Now he festers in a squalid room, while Gabriel's mother waitresses and tangles with a smug young artist.

Against Kureishi's recent work, elegiac and rancid with melancholy, Gabriel's Gift is ballasted by its teenage hero's resilience and a consoling surrealism. Although it begins queasily out of synch - daffodils wink as Gabriel passes, extremes of weather scud by in quick succession, objects he sketches materialise in his room - this psychic disturbance settles down. Gabriel gets sage advice from Archie, the twin who died when they were little, now a guiding, even angelic, voice.

As with several of the author's previous protagonists, Gabriel's passive circumspection is slashed by decision. The teenager is gifted with a strong visual imagination which he longs to put on film. A more immediate gift comes from the starry Lester, who gives the boy one of his squiggly crayon drawings (the shade of Bowie, as ever in Kureishi, looms large). While Gabriel's parents see the drawing as a ladder out of impecunious circumstances, Gabriel treasures both it and Lester's encouragement. Art has to work hard to sustain lives in this novel, which doggedly refers to Tarkovsky and Laurel and Hardy, Così and Strawberry Fields.

Gabriel's Gift, sketched in pastels, returns to the Kureishi of sweet sarcasm and affectionate banter. The parents are bewildered and fitful, weary of fending off blows to the heart. However thin the supporting cast (the twinkling restaurateur, the helping-hand acquaintances, the sturdy au pair terrified by English conversation), this Chagallian portrait in thin, bright colours is shaded throughout with yearning and streaked with optimism.

As he zips about north of the river, Gabriel imagines capturing the distracted impulses of London life. This isn't a swarming London novel, but a charming, light-textured fable about talent, about how single-minded creativity might embrace and even be buoyed by the heartbreaking muddle of everyday life.

Like The Buddha of Suburbia, Rex becomes something of a shyster-guru who discovers a knack with the over-privileged young, and the plot's worst-case anxieties are diffused. Alongside the urge to blow down the house of cards comes a tender impulse towards reconstruction. The house doctor has a hand in this novel, which allows a cottage, a marriage and Gabriel secure in his vocation. It even ends in action. Will this sunshiny new Kureishi stick around?